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‘Hospital Visitors’
A sharp gust of river air makes me look up, sensing some commotion at the distant end of the corridor. Wild and heedless, pressing towards me full of fathomless intent, striped by the light from high-vaulted windows, knocking soft cartilage against the walls, three mud-flecked swans smelling of tundra dip and lift their fearsome, faintly…
Read MoreJust One Poem
When I first started writing all I wanted to do was to have one poem published. Just one, I told myself, and then I would be happy. I didn’t think beyond this because I didn’t really believe it would happen. It was the poet Jennifer Copley who told me about poetry magazines and persauded me…
Read More‘Thirteen’
There are ginger toms on the fire escape and curtains tied in knots – nine flights up your cigarette ash is burning white and a guy in the corner one they forgot – a puppeteer of memory doesn’t have a clue – this could be New York, a sketch pad in the Hotel Chelsea and…
Read More‘Blue Peninsula’
For Joseph Cornell Personally I like the hotel’s Spartan décor, the parakeet in the lobby, the way ships salvage has been reused to give the place a nautical air; the fishing net over the windows, for example, which prevents guests from falling out. Every room has a view of the Blue Peninsula. It’s the parrot…
Read MoreHelen Taylor – Merseybeat
Helen Taylor recorded live at The Poetry School’s Is There A Doctor In The House? PhD festival in March 2014. Read our ‘Meet the Doctors’ interview with Helen here.
Read MoreJohn Challis – The Poem Noir
John Challis recorded live at The Poetry School’s Is There A Doctor In The House? PhD festival in March 2014. Read our ‘Meet the Doctors’ interview with John here.
Read MoreLogbook: ‘Dear Mr Gove today I taught the children not to sit like bags of small potatoes in their chairs’
End of year concert for one of my schools today. There were about 60 children playing trumpets, cornets and baritones, and then about twenty fifes and flutes and about ten violins. This concert is always great fun and there is usually some barely averted disaster – this is the concert where someone was once sick…
Read MoreKathy D’arcy – Irish Women’s Poetry
Kathy D’arcy recorded live at The Poetry School’s Is There A Doctor In The House? PhD festival in March 2014.
Read MoreAlireza Abiz – Publishing Poetry in Iran: a Kafkaesque Experience
Alireza Abiz recorded live at The Poetry School’s Is There A Doctor In The House? PhD festival in March 2014. Read our ‘Meet the Doctors’ interview with Alireza here.
Read MoreA B Jackson – The Poetry of Polar Exploration
A B Jackson recorded live at The Poetry School’s Is There A Doctor In The House? PhD festival in March 2014. Read our ‘Meet the Doctors’ interview with A B here.
Read MoreTara Bergin – Proof: a poem-film made in response to The Bloodaxe Poetry Archive
Tara Bergin recorded live at The Poetry School’s Is There A Doctor In The House? PhD festival in March 2014. Read our ‘Meet the Doctors’ interview with Tara here.
Read MoreLogbook: ‘I am writing this in my tent with my head torch on’
Despite being officially my day off music teaching, today is the only day I can fit in an hour lesson with an adult who comes for an hour lesson on the tuba. I really enjoy teaching this lesson because this pupil always practices – so I can actually see if the things I’ve set for…
Read MoreOpen Workshop: ‘Putting A Poet In Your Pocket’
Hot on the heels of her ‘Show Us Your Poems’ surgery, current Digital Poet in Residence Kim Moore leads the next in our Open Workshops series… Reading other people’s poetry is vital to keep our own poems alive and breathing. In this workshop, you are going to be carrying around a poet in your pocket,…
Read More‘Tunnelling-out’
Instead let me tell you how to present yourself at all times. With me? Yes. Embrace your inner standing still. The shadows? They’ll stare, they’ll stare. Sweetheart, clay- eyes, you with the sootfall heart. Eat. More. Rocket. Its tinselly fronds will nourish. Redemption Is lying with her feet up in the next road, the moles,…
Read More‘She Leaves’
a hollow space, without plump cushions snug as velvety moles, or her clay lamp that dappled the ceiling with shadows, where red and green wires now blast through a gash in the plasterwork like the WHAAM! of a pop art rocket. I slam tall shutters back on themselves and a wane light embraces the dark…
Read More‘A History of Rockets’
Let me tell you this: history is a nonsense. They blanked me out of their books, their stories, their minuscule minds but here is the truth: Take a pinch of stolen black powder, a man in a moon, a love of the light and the blackest of nights – this is the real history of…
Read MoreA Room of One’s Own
A couple of years ago I decided to have ‘A Room of One’s Own’ tattooed on my lower right forearm. It is extremely hard to explain to people what the words mean – I found this out when I tried to tell the tattooist why I was having this particular tattoo. How to explain that…
Read More‘A Sonnet for Clay Eaters’
Clay crushed under calloused feet and cajoled by hopeful hands is hurled into moulds and sun baked near cottonwood trees. And so, parched bricks are made, one on top another, to build a home. You squat inside, let terra red shadows swaddle your born-bright who stares at you as if seeing God. She pitches arias…
Read MoreEvery Page A Stage
[Movie trailer voice-over style announcement, very deep and gravel throated]: Coming Soon from The Poetry School – Every Page A Stage – starring Jane Draycott! With lots of sessions over two weeks and a real concentration of attention on a topic, we’re delighted to welcome Jane Draycott back to the Poetry School with her Every…
Read MoreLogbook: ‘There was the time I woke up in the morning and forgot how to walk’
Conversation overheard at running club: Runner A: “Who do you get to wash your windows?” Runner B: “The rain washes my windows” Runner C: “That’s what ‘usbands are for” Runner A: “Well the rain is my ‘usband” *** After watching a documentary about death row in America.. Who would live in a house on the…
Read MoreNew Homers – a Reading & Writing Course
I’ve had a vivid and unscholarly interest in the Homeric stories since I was a boy. In those days both the battles of the Iliad and Odysseus’s wanderings among monsters and goddesses filled me with a simple, childish sense of wonder. In my early twenties I discovered Patrocleia, the first section of Christopher Logue’s Homer…
Read MoreThe Plot Inside The Poem
The playwright David Mamet famously said that what we want to know more than anything else is ‘what happens next’. My own obsession with narrative goes back to my writerly roots in theatre and later in film; I’m always looking for the story, even when it isn’t obvious. I’ve been making a study of the…
Read MoreLogbook: ‘My first day as Digital Poet-in-Residence is almost over’
Monday 28th April My first day as Digital Poet-in-Residence is almost over – in 30 minutes to be exact. I felt very different today – not in a turning-into-a-hologram kind of way, as some of my friends have helpfully suggested as being what will happen when I become ‘in-resident’ but in a ‘I-feel-like-a-writer’ kind of…
Read MoreLive Q&A with Jen Hadfield: 7 May, 1pm
Who listens like lichen listens . . . ‘Lichen’, Jen Hadfield We’re delighted to have an exclusive audience with Jen Hadfield, who will be coming to CAMPUS on May 7 to discuss the startlingly original, Byssus, her latest collection, and her first after the T.S. Eliot prize-winning Nigh-No-Place. Byssus – pronounced ‘bissus’, and meaning the…
Read MoreMeet the Digital Poet in Residence: Kim Moore
An Interview with Kim Moore
What on earth do poets do all day? It’s never been easy to earn your way as a professional poet, even for the greats. Wallace Stevens sold insurance policies, T S Eliot managed checking accounts, Marianne Moore worked in a library, Maya Angelou sang in nightclubs and Robert Frost was a chicken farmer (and his earliest…
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